Informatica World, Las Vegas, May 12, 2015 – Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq:INFA), the world’s number one independent provider of data integration software, today showcased key innovations in the Informatica Intelligent Data Platform (IDP) to integrate, prepare, master and secure data. In the new computing age of engagement, the world of data expands beyond transaction data in database applications and in cloud services to include interaction data in social media, in mobile apps and in the Internet of Things (IoT). Speaking at the 16th annual Informatica World conference in Las Vegas, chairman and chief executive officer, Sohaib Abbasi, outlined the product innovation strategy to power the Data Ready Enterprise in the new age of engagement.
MyPOV – Wow it’s the 16th edition already? And good to see Informatica is building out on the IDP – no need to start a new platform, make the exiting one more powerful. Less excitement for press and analysts, but more value for customers and partners.
“As the purpose of computing evolves from the age of productivity to the age of engagement, four technology trends are disrupting the computing platform,” said Abbasi. “First, the economics of cloud is disrupting the computing infrastructure; second, the diversity of social media and the Internet of Things are disrupting the data infrastructure; third, the richness of big data is disrupting the analytics infrastructure; and fourth, the perimeter-less world of pervasive computing is disrupting the security infrastructure. Each disruptive trend opens up an exciting new opportunity: hybrid cloud integration, next-generation data integration, Internet of master data and data security visualization.”
MyPOV – Abbasi is right on all four disruption areas, but in my view we are not on the age of engagement… we are in the age of infinite computing, which changes business best practices and customer / people engagement is one key trend and driver. But good to see a CEO cover four disruption areas.
Abbasi showcased key innovations, including: Project Atlantic for cloud integration, Project Sonoma and Rev for next-generation data integration and preparation, Social360 for the Internet of master data and Secure@Source for data security intelligence and analytics.
MyPOV – Ok here we go – these are the four product names to remember and watch in the next quarters as Informatica rolls them out and drives for adoption in the customer base.
Informatica Project Atlantic for Cloud Integration. In the new age of engagement, more machine interaction data is being captured by mobile apps, websites and the IoT. Project Atlantic uses genetic algorithms to automatically infer the structure and semantics of machine interaction data, and integrate such data with structured transaction data. Project Atlantic will be integrated with Informatica Cloud and IDP to integrate data – transaction and machine interaction – in the cloud or on-premise.
MyPOV – Making sense and determining what to do with data has always been a human domain, but with the benefits of the cloud era, software can not only make sense of data, but also determine what to do with the data. A key value for customers looking less manual work and complexity in the process of trying to domesticate the ‘wild zoo’ of data out there. Atlantic will stand and fall with the power and quality of its analytic algorithms – so will be an interesting area to see grow.
Informatica Project Sonoma for Big Data Integration. Designed for big data projects, Project Sonoma will improve the agility of data scientists while enabling better governance by IT. For big data projects, with growing volumes and varieties of interaction data, organizations are increasingly adopting Hadoop-based data lakes. Using Project Sonoma, developers will be able to productively find, ingest, prepare, provision, secure and govern data – transaction and interaction – managed in Hadoop data lakes.
MyPOV – Good to see Informatica tackle the BigData domain with an aspect of governance, too, though we see enterprises still in the early days of BigData driven insights. In this phase insight will trump everything, even governance. But it will be up to products like Project Sonoma to not only offer data manipulation capabilities, but also enable vital governance best practices. But these are only evolving, so a flexible product architecture will be key and we will try to catch up more in detail at InformaticaWorld later this week.
Informatica Rev for Business User Data Preparation. Designed for self-service by business users, Informatica Rev simplifies data preparation with guided recommendations for tasks such as curating, combining and enriching data. Using Rev, business users simply merge data from multiple sources and standardize and prepare the data for analysis in visualization tools. To operationalize data preparation tasks by business users, Informatica Rev will automatically generate mappings for IT developers to administer.
MyPOV – The end user / business user enablement it the biggest disruptor the enterprise software industry faces. Those vendors who get this right will disrupt those who won’t or will be slow at productizing on this trend. The driver for end user enablement is simply that business users do not have the time to deal with IT, implementation teams, consultants and RfPs for IT tasks. Rev is a good step towards that goal. Feel free to checkout our first review of ‘Springbok’ here.
Social360 for Internet of Master Data. Informatica MDM now offers Social360 to view master data, relationships and associated interactions, including social media feeds and media mentions. By matching transactions with social relationships, Informatica MDM can identify the top influencers among the most valuable customers. Designed to run natively on Hadoop, Informatica Big Data Relationship Management identifies household and social relationships across billions of records representing millions of people.
MyPOV – Good move by Informatica to enrich MDM data with social data. Even surprised it is only happening now. But certainly a key product to watch, as there have been a number of social tools, but tying them back to the enterprise information backbone of transactional applications has always been a challenge. Bringing together social data and Informatica’s proven MDM products is a good move.
Informatica Secure@Source. Designed to mitigate the risk of data breaches in traditional databases and Hadoop, Secure@Source defines a new category, Data Security Intelligence and Analytics. Secure@Source mitigates the risks of breaches by detecting, classifying and monitoring the risks associated with proliferation and usage of sensitive data. Last month, Secure@Source won the gold award for the best new security product at the security industry’s premier event, the RSA conference.
MyPOV – Security remains a top concern for enterprises… just mention Target. So it’s good to see that Informatica is tackling the process at the root, with the data. But it remains a major undertaking for both vendors and enterprises, and we are only at the very early (though) encouraging stages.
Overall MyPOV
A good start for Informatica’s user conference, with key product announcements. Good to see the IDP being leveraged and extended. Informatica has a unique opportunity around governance and data level security, that we will be keen to see how the vendor will leverage and capitalize that in the next quarters. That all plays hand in hand with end user enablement products such as Rev – which have the greatest disruption potential in enterprise software. The Social360 addition to MDM is also a good innovation, adoption will be key, as social savvy enterprises have already their social infrastructure in place and Informatica needs to capture these accounts. Partnerships with Social vendors would be an area to execute on and to watch.More on Informatica:
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